Code Red when hiring a writing coach

Hire a terrific writing coach and you might pierce the veil that stands between you and truly melodious and imaginative storytelling. Hire a poor writing coach and it could be a crushing blow that turns you into damaged goods.

When considering such matters you would do well to follow the advice of writing instructor Natalie Goldberg. She’s the author who hit big with Writing down the Bones, a guide about how to free the writer within you.

Goldberg points to one requirement that should be observed when evaluating a writing coach. That is a teacher who is also writing. Not a teacher who wants to write and isn’t writing, but one who is actively writing.

If a writing coach isn’t actively writing it’s a sure sign that he or she has a very strong inner critic that is preventing them from producing content. If you become that person’s student, Goldberg says, that inner critic will be turned on you.

We’re all familiar with the inner critic. It’s that voice inside our heads continually casting aspersions on everything we write. It degrades our confidence and can turn writing into such a grinding affair that we chuck it in favor of less painful activities – such as reading and criticizing the work of others, under the guise of being a “writing coach.”

Julia Cameron, Goldberg’s close friend and fellow writing instructor, warns that a writing coach who can only tell you what’s wrong with your work is a dangerous teacher.

Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way and The Right to Write, tells the story of a young lady she taught at Northwestern. She was one of the most gifted writers Cameron had come across, yet she was so clueless about her talent she considered herself foolish to be writing at all. Over time, Cameron discovered the student had a high school instructor who had done great damage. Whenever the student turned in a paper to this domineering and competitive teacher, all that came back were comments such as, “Consider your use of the semicolon.”

“She never got any feedback that was good,” Cameron says.

One exercise Cameron uses when teaching a classroom of students is to assess one another’s work as a group with this proviso: They are only allowed to comment on the strengths of each other’s writing. No criticism is permitted.

“It’s astounding how even a 17-year-old has a very hard time being positive,” Cameron says, “because we’ve been brought up in our school systems to be critical.”

When you only focus on a writer’s flaws, those flaws get magnified, Cameron says. Meanwhile, their strengths will often start to wobble and fall away. Conversely, if you focus on their strengths they not only become magnified, the weaknesses tend to minimize themselves or even fall away.

Both Cameron and Goldberg teach stream-of-consciousness writing methods intended, in part, to shelve the inner critic and allow the writer within to fully express. The idea is to shrink the inner critic and make it less debilitating, force it to stand in the corner or temporarily leave the premises so the writing process can go forth untrammeled by its scurrilous barbs.

When it’s time to edit our output we reintroduce the inner critic, hopefully in a tamer, more constructive form.

And when it’s time to work with a writing coach, make sure that person’s own literary aspirations haven’t been paralyzed by an inner critic that has grown to monstrous proportions and is poised to do a Godzilla to your writing.

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